Not seeing dead people

Published 3:55 pm, Friday, September 7, 2012

There was no way to be sure, but I was convinced the iguanas were laughing at me.

Three of them were draped over the heavily whitewashed stone wall (and each other) - scaly old men on a shady veranda, set in place as if sudden movement might cause them great pain or sorrow.

"Ahh, mi amigo, you are doing muy bueno," the largest of them seemed to say, "but it is very hot and you will not find him."

Then he laughed. Probably.

He and his companions resembled little more than a casting call for a 1950s dinosaur movie, but he was correct: It was unlikely I would find the grave of Mundaca the Pirate.

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It's not that the famous resting place is particularly well-hidden - no more so than any other grave in the old cemetery on Mexico's Isla Mujeres. I just have a particularly poor record when it comes to finding dead people.

On Maui, we had been driving for three hours through the 600 hairpin turns and past the hundreds of waterfalls along the Road to Hana. My wife, Ann, whose car sickness-prevention method is to fall asleep instantly on any trip with a turn of more than 90 degrees, had been eager to see the Seven Sacred Pools.

Having been raised by an aviation nut, I knew even as a youngster that Lindbergh belongs on the Mount Rushmore of flight. I cherished a balsa wood model kit of his Spirit of St. Louis plane (that never quite made it out of the box). But in the tiny village beyond the Seven Sacred Pools, there were no signs for his grave, which supposedly is on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. I asked for directions.

Then we asked someone else. And again.

By the third set of instructions - all seemingly genuine but all, somewhat suspiciously, resulting in further confusion - I remembered that Lindbergh, the focus of books, movies, songs, millions of admirers and one of the best-known kidnapping cases in U.S. history, had tried to be a very private man. Some portion of his love of Maui had been about being able to be private - and I was trying to hunt him down, "honoring" him by trampling his favorite private spot.

We turned and left.

The locals in Sevilla, Spain, weren't trying to hide Christopher Columbus' tomb - it just worked out that way. After striking out at the convent where he often stayed - plenty of sarcophaguses, as well as a statue of him, but not his grave - we wandered the city's cavernous cathedral (possibly where the term "nooks and crannies" was invented). Finally, a guide pointed to a sarcophagus held aloft by four statues, the place of eternal rest for a wandering soul.

Except that, while the remains inside definitely belong to someone, Columbus' ashes-to-ashes and dust-to-dust probably are still at his grave in the Dominican Republic. Of course.

There have been other times with the same result - although I found voodoo queen Marie Laveau and jazz jester Louis Prima without even looking - but each time it's easy to wonder: What's the attraction of famous graves? In St. George's chapel in Windsor Castle, I watched packs of tourists - who had shrugged off the gothic architecture and masterful stained glass - suddenly turn into dazed children around the crypts and vaults.

Are we just morbid? Do we believe that standing in the presence of the brittle bones of great people will give us insight? Or is it just that, sometimes, our most compelling connection with a place is through the people who lived (and died) there?

It can't hurt to be reminded that a place had great value to someone you admire - albeit a complete stranger who now is, well, dead.

Lindbergh loved his resting place (wherever it is), and Columbus (or whoever it is) ended in a spot that spoke to his status in history. With Mundaca the Pirate, it isn't quite that simple.

Supposedly, Mundaca Marecheaga, who made his fortune as a slave trader in the 1800s, owned a sizable chunk of Isla Mujeres and is buried there. The famous inscription on his tomb, according to our guidebook, translates to:

"As I am now, someday you shall be."

The tiny graveyard looked as if someone took the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans - all above-ground crypts, monuments, vaults and tombstones - and compacted it into one-third the space. After 45 minutes of searching, sweating and threading through the pint-size city of the dead under the face-melting Mexican sun, we gave up.

Even if we had found the grave, however, I would have missed Mundaca. Toward the end of the same page in the guidebook, the author added that the pirate isn't actually here - he died in a brothel in Merida and is buried there.

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